Widescreen Gaming Forum

Hi everyone, I've put together a very 'ghetto' 3 screen surround powered by a lowly 650ti on an i7-3770 rig. I put it together mainly for experimentation but now I'm actually quite fond of it so I'd like to get some opinions on how to set up best.

I'm using three old HP1955 monitors that I have debezelled with reasonable results. They are arranged in portrait as they have swivel stands - landscape made them a bit too wide and not tall enough. I've configured surround and added bezel correction resolutions.

One thing I would like to know id whether NV Surround is the best option for a game like Grid:2 or whether I should use the games' 'native' multi monitor support. Does 'native' mean that effectively I use the three screens in Windows like any other multi screen system and then the game combines the screens itself ? Which would look best - surround or native ?

Sorry if I'm rambling, I'm new to this and got quite a few ideas / questions rattling around in my head. Cheers

The best solution for all surround gaming is stitching the screens together so that the games see all the displays as one. So yes, using nVidia Surround is the best option. The other solutions that you could use without a hardware change are software solutions, and software solutions always have performance hits.

markoneswift wrote:One thing I would like to know id whether NV Surround is the best option for a game like Grid:2 or whether I should use the games' 'native' multi monitor support. Does 'native' mean that effectively I use the three screens in Windows like any other multi screen system and then the game combines the screens itself ? Which would look best - surround or native ?

There are a handful of games that have native multi monitor support in the sense that they see each monitor as an individual just as windows does and will utilize them as the game can. I am not familure with GRID's multi mon support, however I am with Assetto Corsa which can use multiple monitors without the need for nv-surround or amd-eyefinity technologies as it has multi mon built into the game engine.
Another example would be Supreme Commander, which uses a 2nd monitor to draw an additional view port/map.

In these situation, like with Assetto Corsa, the game is creating a new camera view port, which is technically better and helps to reduce the effects of lens fisheye effects which cause distortion at the far edges.
By using additional camera view ports the FOV of each camera is not as wide and thus less distortion takes place, and with individual detection it is easy to configure HUD locations etc, although creating multiple camera view ports crates more work and thus does have some performance hit.

NV-Surround and AMD-Eyefinity are technologies to simply stitch several monitors together, in the hope that an older or even new game will be able to render at the larger resolution and adjust the single camera view port's FOV.
Many games are subsequently then modified to patch HUD's back into the center of a large resolution etc (as evident of the many fixes found here at WSGF).

In my mind true native support is the pinnacle of support and I would always use this method of display when a game supports this over eyefinity/surround.

A nice trick however is that with native support is that you can combine them with surround/eyefinity technologies to create some very cool setups.